Page 41 - Studio International - September 1970

1
Henry Staźewski
Relief 10/69
Wood, metal, acrylic
100 x 100 cm.
National Gallery, Prague
2
Zdenĕk Sýkora
A view of the exhibition, March 1970
Śpálova Gallery, Prague
3
Karel Nepraš
Head with a Handle 1970
Cast iron, gears, handles
42.5 x 14 cm.
4&5
Eva Kmentová
Tracks March 1970
Plaster
Śpálova Gallery, Prague,
6 & 7
Zorka Ságlová
Homage to Gustav Oberman March 1970
Bransoudon near Humpolec (South-East Bohemia)

assured him that the result was monumental
and beautiful. The Oberman in whose
homage the event was held was, they say,
a cobbler who used to walk through the fields
spitting balls of fire; but this forerunner of
fire-land-art was little appreciated and was
beaten up for his pains.
To return to the galleries, the National
Gallery held—after exhibiting work by Klein,
Raysse and Cremonini and a collection of
contemporary American paintings—a show
of works by the 'classic' of Polish abstract
art, Henryk Staźewski. Staźewski began his
work almost half a century ago with the
Vilno and Warsaw 'Group of Cubists,
Suprematists and Constructivists' (`Blok').
This group emerged as a continuation of the
Russian revolutionary avant garde —Malevich
himself was half Polish—and the initiators of
the group, both of them great artists,
Wladyslaw Strzemiński and Katarzyna Kobro,
were born on what was then Czarist territory
and belonged in post-revolutionary Petersburg
to the Russian avant garde. This Polish
group is little known, yet its works represent
one of the most original chapters in the
history of modern art. Staźewski alone is still
alive; he has always retained an undeviating
loyalty to his artistic conviction without ever
repeating himself. At the last but one Venice
Biennale we saw his silvery reliefs made out of
aluminium; the Prague exhibition contained
later works, in which the artist returned to
colour. For Staźewski a painting is a field of
forces which gives an impulse to the inert
colour-shapes placed within it. The result is a
very unstable equilibrium. The absolute
sovereignty with which he provokes and
stabilizes this conflict put Staźewski into the
same rank as his contemporaries in the
generation of abstract art in the period fol-
lowing the First World War—Moholy-Nagy,
Lissitzky, Rodchenko. q